Poll: Michael Bloomberg Wouldn’t Have a Prayer Running as Independent for President

A new poll looking at a hypothetical three-way presidential race between Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggests Sanders and Trump would be neck-and-neck in the race, while Bloomberg would finish a distant third.

According to the Sunday poll by Morning Consult, in a three-way contest, Sanders has 35 percent support, Trump 34 percent and Bloomberg just 12 percent — 19 percent of voters are undecided.

The results suggest that Bloomberg won’t do any better with Sanders in the race than he would going against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In an earlier Morning Consult poll, Trump led Clinton 36 percent to 35 percent, while Bloomberg polled at 13 percent.

Bloomberg also gets a similar amount of the vote if the Republican nominee is changed to Sen. Marco Rubio or Sen. Ted Cruz , though the number of “undecided” voters spikes, giving Sanders a 36-28 lead over Cruz and a 36-29 lead over Rubio.

The former New York City mayor entered the media spotlight over the weekend when The New York Times reported he is seriously considering a White House bid, with a final decision expected by early March. According to the Times, Bloomberg is frustrated by the lack of moderate figures in the 2016 race, and is most likely to enter if Sanders and Trump respectively win the Democratic and Republican nominations. But if he does so, today’s poll suggests Bloomberg has a long way to climb.

While Bloomberg’s support is limited, it is also bipartisan. In the contest against Sanders and Trump, he gets 14 percent support from Democrats, 11 percent from Independents and 10 percent from Republicans.

Morning Consult’s poll was conducted from Jan. 21-24 and had a sample size of 1,439 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

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